Selling beautiful crafts to support the artisans who create them makes everyone feel good. But are these businesses truly sustainable?
This is a good question. As Viva! Consult continues to link caring businesses and people with NGO projects worldwide, the sustainability factor should always be the focus.
World Pulse Magazine by Whitney Joiner | October 28, 2009
One day, halfway into a trip to Uganda, Colorado psychologist Torkin Wakefield took an afternoon walk with her daughter and a family friend. They stopped to talk with a local woman who was sitting by the road crafting necklaces. The woman told them that to support herself she crushed rocks by hand in a quarry nearby for a dollar a day; in her spare time, she and her friends made necklaces by rolling brightly colored paper—trash that they’d recovered—into beads and stringing the beads into necklaces. “Why aren’t you selling these?” Wakefield asked, after convincing the woman to let her buy a handful. “There’s no market for them,” the woman answered. read more…
